Dartmouth College and Clemson University

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The advent of mobile health (mHealth) technology brings great opportunity to improve quality of life, improve individual and public health, and reduce healthcare costs. Although mHealth devices and applications are proliferating, many challenges remain to provide the necessary usability, manageability, interoperability, availability, security, and privacy. The goal of this project is to engineer the tools for, and lay the scientific foundation of, secure wearable mHealth. In the process, we are developing a general framework for body-area pervasive computing, centered around health-monitoring and health-management applications.

Our vision is that computational jewelry, in a form like a bracelet or pendant, will provide the properties essential for successful body-area mHealth networks. These devices coordinate the activity of the body-area network and provide a discreet means for communicating with their wearer. Such devices complement the capabilities of a smartphone, bridging the gap between the type of pervasive computing possible with a mobile phone and that enabled by wearable computing.

Our interdisciplinary team of investigators is designing and developing ‘Amulet’, an electronic bracelet and a software framework that enables developers to create (and users to easily use) safe, secure, and efficient mHealth applications that fit seamlessly into everyday life. The research is determining the degree to which computational jewelry offers advantages in availability, reliability, security, privacy, and usability, and developing techniques that provide these properties in spite of the severely-constrained power resources of wearable jewelry.

We described our vision for this concept in a 2012 HotMobile paper, and published a detailed description in a 2016 SenSys paper. We began preliminary research under NSF award number 0910842 and HHS/ONC award number 90TR0003-01. The ongoing research, and bulk of the effort, is funded by the NSF CSR program under award numbers CNS-1314281,1619970 (Dartmouth) and CNS-1314342,1619950 (Clemson).

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Text and images on this site are copyrighted material, with copyright held by Dartmouth College or by the author of each blog post. University logos are trademarks of their respective university and are used by permission. This research program is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award numbers CNS-1314281, CNS-1314342, CNS-1619970, and CNS-1619950, with preliminary work funded by the NSF under award number 0910842 and by the Department of Health and Human Services (SHARP program) under award number 90TR0003-01. The views and conclusions contained on this site are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of NSF. Any mention of specific companies or products does not imply any endorsement by the authors or by the NSF.
The Amulet logo was designed by the students of the DALI lab at Dartmouth.
The Amulet case and its integration with an off-the-shelf wristband were co-designed by the Amulet team and the students of the DALI lab at Dartmouth. We are grateful to their creativity and assistance!